[Award Winner] Painting maps in Painter

[Sirith]

Some members, like ravells and pyrandon, were interested in a tutorial in how I do my maps. I think tutorial is too strong a word for this, though. So I'm going to call it a walkthrough .
First a disclaimer: there are a million ways to draw and paint a map. You could do a combination of traditional and digital methods, you can really paint (so no cartoony line art), use any combination of digital tricks. This is just roughly the way I've drawn the two maps I've posted earlier.


What am I going to walk you through?
A process of drawing and painting maps freehand in Painter. It’s basically what you’d do with traditional media (pencil, ink, paint), but digital. I’m not going to use digital tricks other than layers and their properties, and the painting tools available in the program.

What would you need?
A tablet. Seriously, don’t torture your wrist.
Any painting program will do. I use Painter, but Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, ArtWeaver (a free painting program), or ANY program that allows you to paint is good. It has to provide you with tools to ‘ink’, ‘paint’ and 'blend', and that’s it.
For this specific walkthrough, I need layers. But I use very few, I like the challenge with using only two or three layers.

Here are the tools I use in Painter.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...intertools.jpg
I don't know of any analogues in Photoshop or so, you'd have to experiment a bit. Don't choose tools that are too 'perfect' though, like an airbrush. A bit of roughness in the final product is preferred over perfectly smooth transitions.


If you're going to join me in this drawing, then I'd love to see some results from you guys .



STEP 1: The Sketch

Alright. Here I start with a blank canvas and very simply throw down some basic shapes. I don't care for prettiness, it needs to be recognizable, but that's it.
After that I throw down the opacity on that layer, create a new one above it, and start refining the sketch. I add in mountains, rivers, cities, cliffs, some small lakes. This need not be pretty either, it just has to be clear where the definite lines will go in the inking step.

In this step it's most important to think about the geography of the lands. It's where you build your world.
Another point to take into consideration is composition. Overall balance in the picture. I’m not great at this, but take a few steps back and look at the picture through half closed eyelids. Does it look good? Is there a balance between dark and light (mountains are much darker than plains in my case)? Is your eye drawn to the place you want it to?

I have made a coastal region, with a small mountain range ending up on a peninsula. I had Pompeii-like images in my mind, and thought a volcano would be awesome in several ways.
If you look at it, the mountain range sucks all the attention towards itself, and ‘flows’ more or less towards the peninsula and the volcano. This area is really the focal point of the map, so viewers are going to assume this is where the action takes place.
Also, it splits the lands in half, which is usually not a really good thing. However, you can make it work, and I hope I will here . Perhaps the mountain range provides a natural boundary between the two lands, and they fight wars in those same mountains, which could be enough justification to make it the most important part of the map.


You may notice my lack of woods. That's because I have not yet discovered a relatively easy way to draw these without being frustrated . I would love to draw every single tree, but it just takes so much time, while the resulting pattern is not really regular enough for my tastes. So I'm leaving them out now..


Next up are the inks!